Why Donald Trump, Not Paul Ryan, Is Setting the G.O.P. Agenda

WASHINGTON — Speaker Paul D. Ryan delivered his party’s weekly address on Friday — a rarity — giving a peek at the House Republican agenda that he and his colleagues will begin to roll out next week.

That agenda was originally supposed to counter Donald J. Trump, whose views often stand apart from the party’s policy traditions. But now that Mr. Ryan has officially endorsed his party’s presumptive nominee, he says that his policy ideas will magically become Mr. Trump’s, and that the nominee will help advertise them this fall and eventually promulgate them from the White House.

The six policy task forces in the House will release their prescriptions one at a time over a course of Fridays this summer, under the broad title “A Better Way.” But perhaps it should be called “A Bedeviled Way.”

Despite Mr. Ryan’s efforts to take some control, however, here are four reasons Mr. Trump, not the House speaker, is far more likely to set the Republican agenda this summer at his party’s convention and into the fall campaign.

Mr. Trump has the bigger megaphone.

Mr. Trump, long before he secured his party’s nomination, has shown a remarkable ability for getting television coverage of his pronouncements. His remarks about building a wall between the United States and Mexico (not embraced by Mr. Ryan), barring most Muslims from entering the country (ditto), and ending free trade deals (again) have gotten constant coverage. Mr. Ryan’s promises to end poverty and to address executive authority? Not so much. While Mr. Ryan has weekly news conferences intended to talk about the House agenda, reporters tend to ask him almost exclusively about Mr. Trump.

Some Republican candidates who ran for president this year, like Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and the former Florida governor Jeb Bush, may have differed with Mr. Ryan on the margins on policy, but they hewed to the same core beliefs. Mr. Trump didn’t simply beat those candidates, he destroyed them, often in a highly personal way. The traditional Republican agenda is not selling this year.

If there is party unity, it’s around Mr. Trump, not Mr. Ryan.

The speaker is widely viewed as endorsing Mr. Trump to provide the party with the unity necessary to get House members re-elected and to help Mr. Ryan keep his day job. But if there is any unity in the party, it stems from Mr. Trump’s agenda; Mr. Ryan has struggled to get even basic legislation passed. “Trump had enough votes to win the nomination in pretty convincing fashion,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former aide to the House Republican leadership. “The speaker has had a tough time getting enough votes to pass a budget in the House, let alone pass the rest of his agenda,” he added.

Mr. Ryan’s perceived advantage — his credibility as a Trump alternative — has been blown away.

As Mr. Ryan was giving his modest endorsement to Mr. Trump, the Manhattan businessman was garnering his latest front-page headlines by suggesting that a federal judge overseeing the class-action suit against Trump University was biased because of his “Mexican heritage.” Mr. Ryan, who has been a passionate voice against Mr. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, may have a hard time pressing the “inclusive” agenda he has been promoting while at the same time promising allegiance to Mr. Trump. His voice of skepticism, not his agenda, is what got Mr. Ryan the most attention, and putting it on the shelf may not serve him well.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Trump, Not the House Speaker, Is Setting the Republican Party Agenda. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe